Back of all, however, is the workman's own spine. That's the best thing to lean on; and when the going is heavy, to learn to do without. We often remind each other in Chapel of the modern artist Cezanne, who moved about his painting for many years, painting the thing, satisfying his soul, and leaving his canvasses around in the fields for the peasants to laugh at or mull over. ... They have long since been brought in out of the rain—those canvasses. I forget the incredible thousands his littlest sketch brings now.... But Cezanne got the films out of himself—tallied them off—the landscapes within and without, when it did him most good. It never fails. What was good for the artist is good for the rest of us afterward.
Meanwhile much is still to do in the story world. The big smash of the moving pictures hasn't cleared from our game yet. It will be the cause of greater tales before the end is seen, for you can't portray the realities of romance upon a flat screen. For a time the many thought it was no longer necessary to learn to read, because there was such a torrent of pictures everywhere, but it was only through the pictures that the few has finally managed to realize how marvelously pictorial mere words are, and how few words are required when they are imaginatively driven. One day in Stonestudy we discussed these story and screen affairs, looking ahead somewhat to better times than these. One of our young men, whose story is told in a later chapter, put down the things we talked about. This is Shuk's writing:
A fresh and different vitality is manifest to-day in American literature. At various points around us, dealing with words, colours and the subtler tools, are active young workmen who for the first time, in the fullest sense, may be termed "North American." The first characteristic of this new element, these young flexible and vigorous minds, is that they are workmen—not labourers, not professionals, not primarily artists in anything unless it be life—but workers first, and after that novelists, poets, musicians, painters or politicians. They are not competitors. They have not forgotten the warm side of justice, but they know well the stern face of compassion—they know that it takes Christ and anti-Christ to make a world. They are neither modest nor egotistical, being for the most part busy and intensely alive. This implies their joy.
The great love story has not been written. The few great love stories of the world have to be pieced out by the imagination. We find that we have been told that certain are great love stories, but they do not stand examination. The classic form will not do for the New Age. There is to be a new language—for literary handling. It may be called American, to distinguish it from English in the accepted form. It is to be brisk, brief, brave and ebullient—to meet the modification all must reckon with—the screen-trained mind.
American-mindedness of itself, cannot yet accept a great love-story. It would be called "sentimental" if not lascivious. The average American is an impossible lover, making it incident to business. The real and the sham are equally above him. He would not know when to be exalted or when to be ashamed. He thinks his own passion is evil, and thus makes it so. The great love-story can only be written with creative dynamics, and can only be accepted as yet by the few of corresponding receptivity. There is nothing soft about true romance. Some passionate singer of the New Age will likely appear right soon, his story to have the full redolence and lustre of the heart, his emotions thoroughbred, his literary quality at the same time crystalline with reality.
The big adventure-story has not been done so far. The day of guns, horses and redskins is over. Photoplays have developed these fiction resources to the limit, proving to those writers born to be modern that their full tales can never be shown on a flat surface. There will be undercurrents, overtones, invisible movements, tensions upon the reader, not only from between the lines, but between words. The story-teller of the New Age may handle his theme in words of one syllable, but his tale will have an intensity scarcely to be explained—only responded to by minds which cannot be satisfied by two-plane production—minds which demand more of life than the camera sees.
The real war-story of to-day, even for to-morrow, ought to arrive soon. This is an age for an epic. Some keen and comprehensive mind will arise—a literary genius who will include the patriot, the anarchist, the poet, dramatist, humanitarian, theosophist, dreamer, judge and statesman, even the iciest aces of the air—and tell the story of War, a tale of trenches, kings and arms; blood, heroism and monstrous greed; vast far-reaching causes and the slow, inevitable hell of effects—told from a viewpoint so inclusive that thrones are merely pawns in a Planetary Game.
Inclusion is the first business of the writer who is truly allied with the modern element. Propagandists do not fill the picture. Yesterday the wreckers and agnostics—to-day the specialists and onesided enthusiasts—to-morrow, the embodiers, the includers.